I Am Bismark

2018-05

In case you were wondering, somebody already made the Trump/Anakin Skywalker “They’re like animals” meme.

Python 3 came out 10 years ago and I still never remember to use parenthesis with print.

Sutter and Sansome is a stupidly broken intersection. It desperately needs a right turn signal so more than one vehicle can go through per cycle. So many buses get stuck there for ages. Banning cars downtown would help as well.

Trying to come up with passive aggressive ways to shame the people who cut the line for the N Express bus. Maybe I’ll stick a sign on my backpack.

I helped put out a proper customer-impacting production fire this morning. I can’t remember the last time I had to do that, it’s quite invigorating.

I don’t consider Google Assistant an engineering achievement, but a failure. We have simpler solutions to these problems (semantic web, iCalendar interop), but we failed to make them accessible enough for adoption. So instead we now have a complex creepy data monopoly solution.

Now I’m not saying every fantasy book must be squeaky clean à la Tolkien but in the Wheel of Time the anatomical descriptions are only about women and they keep coming up! It’s almost like a 15 year old teenage boy editor went through sprinkling them everywhere he could.

Dear Robert Jordan, while I appreciate your rich fantasy world, your penchant for anatomical descriptions of young women is a bit much. Egwene folds her arms where? The ring on around Nynaeve’s neck is hanging where? Oh right, you mentioned that already.

The Data Bill of Rights

Back in the spring of 2015 I wrote down these rights about our personal data, which now seem quite apt in the wake of Facebook/Cambridege Analytica, GDPR, and the latest season of Silicon Valley.

At the time I was embroiled in a battle with the board of Spatch trying to keep alive the vision of the decentralized collaboration protocol. I wanted to articulate the importance of what we were building. Sadly I lost that battle, a story for another time perhaps.

Aral Balkan published the more intriguing “Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights”, which broadly encompasses the ideals I was going for.

I still am a strong believer in what I wrote three years ago. More on this topic soon.

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